Hunted (5 page)

The foyer of the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly smelt of designer perfume and fresh flowers. Danny walked past the liveried doorman without breaking his stride. He’d called in here early the previous evening to scope the place out, so he already knew where to go.

He walked straight past reception. None of the tourists or business people paid him any attention. This was something of an art with him, a point of pride. Whenever he was working, he liked to blend into the background, to become a distant figure in an Impressionist painting, just another blurred face in the crowd.

He’d picked out the suit he was wearing at Heathrow yesterday. Didn’t even know its brand. It was grey, entirely unremarkable. A real IBM number. A garment he’d never have worn outside of work.

He’d chosen the black-banded straw trilby he’d seen on display in the airport store window because he’d known its brim would partially obscure his face. His Aviator shades served the same purpose. Meaning that none of the CCTV cameras he’d passed on the way here would have got even a half-decent shot of him.

If for whatever reason someone were to take a closer look at him now, they’d most likely mark him down as an accountant or a lawyer. But strictly middle management, nothing flash.

He pushed through the swing door of the men’s wash room, slipping a standard size-four Phillips screwdriver from his suit jacket pocket as he did. When he reappeared less than two minutes later, it was without the small black Gor-Tex rucksack he’d walked in there with.

Room 112 was on the third floor. Danny took the stairs instead of the elevator, making note of the fire exits and other doorways leading off each landing.

‘You still with me?’ he said out loud as he reached the deserted third-floor landing.

‘Every step.’

The Kid’s voice had come through the Bluetooth audio bead Danny had slotted into his right ear. He was also wearing a transmitter sewn into his jacket lapel. He wanted this meeting recorded. The client’s voice. Everything they discussed. All the information he’d been denied prior to the meet, he wanted to own by the time they were done.

‘Happy eavesdropping,’ he said.

He hooked out the ear bead and slipped it into his suit jacket pocket, knowing that as small as it was, anyone looking for it would soon be able to spot it. He checked his watch. Eleven twenty-nine. A minute early.

He stayed where he was. Staring up through a high window that looked out on to the bluest of London skies, he felt a stab of homesickness for Saint Croix, where the few neighbours he occasionally socialized with all thought he was a yacht broker with business interests in Miami and Saint-Tropez.

His mind wandered, remembering the warmth of the Caribbean sun on his skin and the crackle of twigs and dried leaves beneath his bare feet as he’d walked his four dogs two days before, down through the brushwood to the beach for their morning swim.

He hoped Candy Day was coping OK without him. His
sixty-seven
-year-old housekeeper had been working for him for four years, ever since he’d first begun restoring the dilapidated overseer’s house on the old tobacco plantation out at Grassy Point. Even though Candy never complained, Danny worried that his dogs –
two Rhodesian Ridgebacks and two Dobermanns – ran her ragged whenever he was away.

He didn’t yet know how long he’d have to be here, but he was already looking forward to getting back. He wanted to finish renovating the old tractor barn, where he hoped this summer Lexie would finally come to stay. She’d never been to Saint Croix, had never spent any of her vacations with Danny, not since she’d moved to England to live with her grandmother six years ago. He was planning on asking her at the end of her school term. He was hoping that having her own set of rooms out there might help to swing the decision his way.

He checked his watch again. Eleven thirty sharp. Time to roll. With any luck, the meeting wouldn’t take too long. Lexie boarded at a school across town from here. In the sports day programme he’d been sent, he’d seen she was down for running the fifteen hundred metres later today. Even though he knew she wouldn’t want to see him, he was still planning on watching her from the sidelines.

The residential corridor on the other side of the stairwell’s reinforced glass fire door was empty, spotless and warm. Danny walked its length in silence. Outside Room 112, he took off his hat and put his shades into his jacket pocket. Then he knocked.

A woman with severe short blonde hair opened the door less than two seconds later. She was tall, athletic-looking. Pretty, but with bags beneath her eyes and grim, tight lines at the corners of her mouth. She was late twenties, Danny reckoned. Dressed in a neatly pressed fawn linen suit. No make-up. No nail polish either.

In Danny’s line of work, usually the people he met this early on in assignments were lawyers, private detectives or the relatives of those who’d been kidnapped, threatened or worse.

But one look at this woman’s face told him she was none of these. There was a coldness to her expression. An alertness, too, that made him think straight away that she was military. Or had been once.

‘What do you want?’ she said.

‘Crane sent me.’

‘And you are?’

‘Sam Jones.’

As in Samuel Wilson Jones. Which was one of several fake IDs Danny used for work. Inside his jacket pocket were valid credit cards, a driving licence and the US passport he’d travelled to the UK under. All of which were in Jones’s name. All capable of surviving any level of scrutiny. Danny never used his real name for work.

‘Come in,’ the woman said, watching him, stepping aside.

Danny walked past her into a small hallway. A neatly bearded man in his early thirties, with deep furrows in his cheeks and a long, narrow face, stepped out of a side door into Danny’s path.

He was tall and sinewy, but strong-looking. Built like a basketball player, with crow-black hair combed straight back from his bony forehead. He was wearing a black suit, black shirt.

And if Danny staring right back at him bothered him in anyway, it sure as hell didn’t show.

At the end of the corridor, Danny glimpsed a well-furnished, brightly lit room. The severe-looking blonde woman closed the door behind him and then brushed past him and stood beside the bearded man.

‘My apologies,’ she said. ‘And I’m sure you are not armed. But there are certain security protocols we must follow. So it will be necessary to search you now.’

A whole bunch of objections queued up on Danny’s tongue, but he bit them down. He was here now. Was already committed. And besides, she was right. He wasn’t carrying. He had nothing to hide.

He knew the drill. He faced the wall, spread his feet and flattened his palms against the silky embossed wallpaper.

The bearded man patted him down; found nothing.

Then Danny heard a beep. Then another.

He turned to see the woman gazing at him. In her left hand she held a palm-sized comms detector. As she reached out her empty right hand towards him, he observed that she had a tiny, intricate green rose tattooed on her wrist.

‘We value our privacy too,’ she said. ‘So, please, I would like you to take off your jacket now until the meeting is over.’

The two beeps. The audio bead and the transmitter. She’d found them. She watched Danny patiently. Without emotion. Danny got the feeling she could have stared at him like that all day.

‘Very thorough,’ he said.

If the compliment pleased her, it didn’t show. Danny handed over his jacket. She took his hat as well. He watched as she slid back a mirrored wardrobe door, revealing a large metal case on a
waist-high
shelf. She popped the case’s lid and neatly folded Danny’s jacket and placed it inside along with his hat.

The lining of the case consisted of a metallic mesh, Danny saw. Meaning, he guessed, that it was a Faraday cage, designed to block static electrical fields, including electromagnetic radiation such as radio signals.

In other words, all communication lines to the Kid had just been cut off. Leaving Danny now truly on his own.

The blonde woman snapped the case shut.

‘This way, please,’ she said.

He caught it then. The trace of an eastern European accent in her voice. Concealed. The way his own mother’s voice had sometimes become at backyard Sunday barbecues with his father’s military buddies.

Russian. If he’d had to hazard a guess right then, that was what Danny would have said.

And that feeling of unease that had been dogging him all week, it spiked sky high right about then.

The sitting room the blonde led Danny into was L-shaped, and much larger than he’d expected. Part of a suite. Antique furniture. Modern art. Ornate clocks. Two sets of wide French windows. Two balconies beyond.

Judging by how far away the buildings across the street appeared, Danny guessed this room had a view out over Piccadilly at the front of the hotel.

Two men were sitting side by side on the sofa. The first was early sixties, balding, with old-fashioned wire-framed glasses. He was dressed in a cheap dark suit that hung too loose across his wide bony shoulders.

Steam rose up from the black coffee he was pouring from a white china pot into one of several matching china cups arranged neatly on a glass table before him. He didn’t look at Danny. He gave no indication that he even knew he was there.

It was the second man that Danny’s attention locked on to. A hook-nosed blond guy in a red and white-striped tracksuit, with a gold chain glinting at his right cuff. Hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, he stared right back at Danny through hard, sharp ice-blue eyes. He looked like a boxer waiting to be weighed in for a fight.

Killer eyes
. That was what Danny thought the second he saw him. This was no lawyer. No distraught relative or victim. Which meant that whatever the purpose of this meeting was, it sure as hell wasn’t about getting anyone back.

Protection, then?
It was possible. But Danny doubted it. Because who or what could a man like that need protecting from?

‘I was told this meeting was going to be a one-on-one,’ Danny said. No point talking to the woman or the bearded guy any more. The hawk-faced man was clearly bossing the show.

The man smiled, showing small, clean white teeth. He said, ‘There’s been a change of plan.’ He was softly spoken, his accent Russian also, or perhaps Serbian, Danny guessed. ‘Will you take a coffee?’ he said.

‘No.’

Wrong
, Danny was thinking. Jesus, this all felt so wrong. Because why would a US government source be recommending a Russian or Serbian client to Crane?

‘How about you just tell me why I’m here,’ he said.

The man’s blue eyes twinkled. ‘You’re not going to like it.’

‘Try me.’

The balding man pushed his untouched coffee cup away. He picked up a black leather attaché case from the floor and placed it on the glass table. His hands were scrubbed clean, his fingernails filed. His thumbs rolled the case’s dual combination locks. He kept the lid shut.

‘You’re here because of what you are,’ said the hawk-faced man.

‘What I
am
?’ Danny didn’t understand.

‘A mercenary. A hired gun. A man with a reputation for dealing in violence for money.’

‘I don’t know who you’ve been talking to,’ Danny said, anger mixing now with his nerves, ‘but that’s not what I—’

‘You’re here because it will be easy to hang the blame on you.’

‘The
what
?’

‘The blame. For what I’m about to do …’

Danny knew it then. He was in deep, deep shit.

The realization came too late.

A door clicked behind him. He turned to see a huge man in a black balaclava stepping out of an adjoining room. He was wearing an identical red and white-striped tracksuit to the hawk-faced man. A machine pistol was gripped in his hands.

No way Danny was going to get past him or overpower him. A weapon like that would kill him straight off. Would make enough noise to wake the dead, too.

Exit strategy.
Find a way out of here
, Danny thought. Now.

‘You’ve got no sound suppressor,’ he said. ‘You pull that trigger and you’re going to have every cop in London here in under five minutes.’

‘Ah, but don’t you see?’ said the hawk-faced man. ‘That’s exactly what we want.’

Danny turned to see that the man was still on the sofa, but sitting back now, as relaxed as if he were watching a sequence from a favourite movie, where he already knew what was coming up next.

He gauged the distance to the door leading out of the suite. But the bearded guy with the slick-back who’d searched him was already standing there, pointing a Russian PSM pistol right back at Danny’s chest.

He fought the panic rising inside him. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. How could he have lost control like this?
What the hell
do these people want?

That was when he clocked that the balding, bespectacled man had disappeared from sight.

Danny heard him before he saw him.

A click.

His jaw locked so tight, he nearly bit his own teeth in two. Pain tore through him. Like he’d just been simultaneously torn in a hundred different directions.

His legs buckled.

As he fell, he glimpsed the bespectacled man, a Taser X3
stun-gun
in his hand.

Danny tried to move. His muscles wouldn’t work. He couldn’t
call out. Shadows filled his peripheral vision. He felt something sharp slide slow and deep into his neck. Coolness spread through his veins. Darkness started to fall.

After that, he felt nothing. Danny Shanklin felt nothing at all.

Colonel Zykov was shaking uncontrollably. He’d heard raised voices and a thud through the wall.

He’d been gagged and tied to the radiator in the darkened hotel bedroom for over six hours. He’d had nothing to eat or drink. Dried blood caked his ribboned lips. His muscles felt like they’d been injected with lead.

Through his remaining good eye, he stared at the closed bedroom door, terrified of it opening again.

Across town in the colonel’s penthouse last night, the bespectacled torturer had prised away Zykov’s right cornea with a scalpel and rolled it slowly between his forefinger and thumb before crushing it flat.

Once the colonel had stopped screaming through his gag, the torturer had explained that he was looking forward to plucking the other eye clean out and examining its aqueous fluid – but that, tediously, he would have to wait until after the colonel had first watched his daughter being slowly raped and butchered.

The torturer had hummed softly to himself as he’d waited for the colonel’s shock to dwindle and for the truth serum to intensify its grip once more.

He’d then asked Zykov for the location of what he had stolen
from the Biopreparat weapons facility. Only then had he removed his gag.

The colonel’s memories of what had happened next were a jumble. The SP-17 had claimed him again. It had felt like
drowning
. A struggle in dark, airless depths. Craving oxygen. Biting back vomit. Before hurtling back into the light. Hauled up like a fish. Babbling nonsense. Over and over. Then plunging into cold, howling currents again.

Zykov couldn’t remember the exact moment he’d betrayed the oath he’d long ago made to his six brother officers. Bits of the truth had kept surfacing like storm flotsam spat out of a sinking ship. Until his torturer had at last put together the jigsaw of the colonel’s secret past.

From snatches of conversation the colonel had overheard this morning, it was clear he’d eventually told these animals all they’d needed to know.

If there was a hell, he knew he would end up there now. If there was a God, then Zykov would be punished for the evil he’d potentially unleashed.

Again he tried wrenching himself free. It was no good. Some time during his torture, his wrists and ankles had been securely tied together with thick velvet ropes, so that now when he struggled, it didn’t even hurt.

Dust motes danced in the sunlight filtering through the gaps in the closed curtains. The colonel glimpsed his gloomy reflection in the wardrobe mirror. He’d been dressed in his own clothes after they’d got what they wanted. His fountain pen – a gift from his wife – had somehow got broken in his pocket. He could feel its nib cutting into his chest. Black ink had blossomed across his shirt.

They’d moved him from the penthouse some time in the early hours. Prior to his transportation, he’d been injected with a different drug to the truth serum, one that had left him paralytic and tongue-tied.

They’d put a pair of dark glasses on him to hide the bloody mess of his eye. He’d then been escorted from their van and steered through the reception of whatever hotel this was.

When he’d tried calling out to the hotel’s night porter for help, the hawk-faced man and the bearded thief had just laughed and told the porter that their slurring Russian friend had drunk too much vodka and needed his bed.

The bark and scrape of furniture being dragged came though the wall.

Again the colonel caught the medicinal tang of the healing balm the torturer had massaged into his ankles and wrists just after first light. As if the swellings there from when the blonde had first tied him up at the apartment had somehow been cause for concern.

He thought of his daughter.
Be safe, be safe, be safe
…

Muffled shouts.

Rapid footsteps.

The colonel’s body tensed.

Please don’t let them be coming for me
…

The door burst open. Light poured in. A huge shaven-headed man in a red and white-striped tracksuit marched over to Zykov. He had a waxy, sick-looking complexion, and when he looked down at Zykov, he grinned.

He’d been wordlessly guarding the colonel all morning. Except for when the blonde and the hawk-faced man had come in here to mount each other like dogs in front of Zykov, and that
bitch
had used her knife to slash his lips until he’d fallen silent and still.

The skinhead now untied the colonel from the radiator, and hauled him by his bindings into the room next door.

‘Be careful with him, idiot,’ the blonde woman snapped in Russian. ‘There must be no signs of torture or restraint.’

After what you’ve done to my eye?
the colonel thought in disbelief.
After what you’ve done to my lips? Now you say no bruises? But why? In fact, why are you keeping me alive at all?

It was this last unanswered question that confused him the most. Because surely these people couldn’t be thinking of letting him go. Not after what he’d told them. Surely they must realize that – if released – he’d do everything in his power to prevent them from stealing back what he’d once stolen himself so many years ago.

The skinhead left him in a crumpled heap on the floor. Twisting his neck round, Colonel Zykov stared at the blonde woman.

The
bitch
. The
whore
.

She was crouched by a glass table, pulling on a pair of disposable plastic gloves. She took a surgical knife from a black holdall and held its blade up to the light.

Heavy footsteps pounded past. White trainers. Two people, Zykov counted. A blur of red and white-striped tracksuits. Black balaclavas. Black sunglasses. Assault rifles gripped in gloved hands.

More movement to his right.

A face from a nightmare. The torturer. Smiling down at the colonel now as he moved sideways towards him like a crab. Squatting beside him, he opened his case. He held a loaded hypodermic in his plastic-gloved hand.

No
, the colonel tried screaming through his gag.
Please, I have already told you all that I know.

Zykov felt no shame any more. He’d beg if he was given the chance. He’d do anything –
anything
at all that they said. He squirmed and tried to wriggle away. Fresh urine flooded out across his legs.

Then he froze. He’d just seen that another man was lying motionless on the floor with his back to him. Someone clearly either unconscious or dead. With two fingertips missing from his left hand.

The torturer kneeled. He locked one arm around the colonel’s neck as he began the injection. He tightened his stranglehold when Zykov started to buck. As the paralytic agent took effect, the colonel’s struggles weakened, then stopped.

The torturer rolled Colonel Zykov on to his back. He took out another loaded hypodermic and injected him again. This time in the wrist. The colonel didn’t even flinch. The torturer shone a pen torch into his left eye.

Red flooded the colonel’s vision. He tried and failed to blink it away. Then the torchlight receded and the blonde woman’s face loomed into view.

‘Is he dead yet?’

Am I dead?
the colonel thought.
Is that really what she’s asking? My
God, has he killed me? Is that what he’s just done?

An urge to weep welled up inside Colonel Zykov. To shriek out in protest. But his tongue wouldn’t move. He willed himself to break free from his bonds. To run across the room. To leap from the window. To fly.

The torturer shone the torch into the colonel’s eye again.

I’m no longer breathing, the colonel realized.
Please … help me … please,
someone … please …

‘A few more seconds,’ the torturer said, removing the colonel’s gag.

Pink spots danced across Zykov’s vision.

A memory leapt inside him. From last night. Of the man who’d been stationed outside his daughter’s Moscow apartment block. They’d shown the colonel another transmission of him later, during his torture. Only this time the dead-eyed man had been inside the building. In the darkness of the corridor outside Katarina’s apartment door.

The pink spots before the colonel’s eyes multiplied, expanded and swirled. Patterns as bright as butterfly wings began to emerge. His heartbeat suddenly accelerated. Cramp tore across his ribs.

In defiance of everything that was happening to him, a hope leapt inside him.

Please God
, he prayed.
Please don’t let that man have gone in to her. Please let what I told these people have spared my darling Katti from that …

The torturer leant in and whispered in his ear, ‘It took her over three hours to die. But you know what? From the look on her dirty little cock-sucking face, I truly think it was the best sex she ever had.’

The torturer pulled back and smiled. His lips pinched up like he was blowing a kiss.

Colonel Nikolai Zykov felt it then. Rage. A rush of blood. A fury.
A ballooning of his heart. A crippling pain. An agony that expanded inside him and would not stop.

My God, it’s true
, he thought.
This is it
, I am going to
—

The pain vanished then, and Colonel Zykov felt his whole being shrivel up into a tiny black ball.